Innovation involves lots of deliberation, actions, reactions, conversations, collaboration as well as checks and balances. Currently ideas, challenges, issues, concepts, decisions, elections, opportunities, risks, and suggestions (collectively referred to as Intentions) are manually created and entered by a participant. Voting, commenting, selecting, evaluating and approving such intentions is also a manual action participants must take either collectively or as individuals.
Collaborative sourcing initiatives that start with a blank canvas are typically an uphill battle from the get-go despite an abundance of information and proliferation of easily accessible public and private data sources which results in a “data starved” launch. Participants have very little to work with other than the initial content provided by, for example, the program team and initiative owner. This lack of relevant content and early activity has an impact on participation. The massive rate of transformation in a globally connected world further exasperates the ability to locate, select and update information related to ideas, suggestions, issues, opportunities, risks, proposals and decisions.
Additional challenges facing a standard collaborative sourcing initiative include, for example that: participants are too busy with meeting everyday deliverables to find and submit new intentions or find supporting articles related to an intention; developing intentions requires extensive manual research to ensure the right data points and supporting material are collected; participants struggle to have meaningful interactions and connections to help contribute and achieve the right outcomes; stakeholders have difficulty identifying high value intentions or opportunities and developing actionable solutions to complex problems; challenge owners have to constantly following with participants to vote, comment on and support the ideas believe have potential—even for the simplest decisions; and innovation program managers have to constantly ask reviewers, subject matter experts and managers to evaluate, reject and approve—even for the simplest decisions.